


the shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn

by softshocks



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/F, cf!ingrid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:26:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21668173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softshocks/pseuds/softshocks
Summary: The new world they paved did not need the kind of knight Ingrid wanted to be.
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg/Ingrid Brandl Galatea
Comments: 26
Kudos: 179





	the shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn

**Author's Note:**

> Investing in a rarepair is an extreme sport
> 
> Title from shrike by hozier! Written to carly rae jepsen's dedicated for maximum yearning and optimum land reform!
> 
> Come say hi, i’m @hausofbora on twitter, sharpshocks on tumblr

The new world they paved did not need the kind of knight Ingrid wanted to be.

The knights she knew filled her songs of high praises, of knightly values, of absolute devotion to the goddess. Defend the church, they sung, serve your liege as you are indebted to them. 

The wooden shelves of all the places she has sought respite in were lined of these books bound in leather and, in turn, she was bound to them. Inseparable, in the same way. 

Yet she finds herself on the other side of the war that sought to destroy age-old systems set in place to protect power. 

One of these outdated systems, unfortunately, was the system that included knights.

 _Not a knight,_ Felix spat bitterly, _just a traitor._

 _No longer a knight,_ she admits simply, a stark contrast to the complex pieces her heart was breaking into. 

What use would it be to be a knight that protected this treacherous system that made so many of their lives difficult? What use would it be if she protected the same system that made all of them suffer unhappy childhoods and cause this war? 

Ingrid tries, struggles to find her place in the midst of all the ashes. 

She tries, and she looks at Edelgard - who has worked so hard to initiate all of this into fruition, who has sacrificed much of her life and her youth to bring them where they were now. 

In the new world they paved, there was a new relationship between the humans and the land they roam. Surely there was a place for her. 

All the idols she had worshipped have been destroyed, but Ingrid looks to Edelgard and Ingrid finds the barest hint of her new place. 

-

Edelgard, to no one except Ingrid’s surprise, specifically requests her to be sworn sword. Byleth, recently appointed general and newly wedded to Dorothea, had her own duties, the wielder of the sword of the Creator is kept busy. 

Despite Byleth’s protests, Edelgard had encouraged her to focus on her tasks and building a new life with Mittelfrank’s primadonna. 

Her younger self would have given an arm and a leg to be requested to do this: to serve, to protect, to offer her life to her liege.

Yet she is not met with a ceremony, announcing her knighthood. She is not met with a liege that asks her to devote her life to her person and to land that is not her own. She is not met with a Church that she will fight tooth-and-nail to defend. 

It is far from the knighthood she had wanted for herself, all those years ago, so different from the songs. 

In the chamber, Edelgard asks her, simply. “Would you like to stand by me?” 

Ingrid had followed her through the war, and the world she wanted was the world Ingrid wanted, as well. Of course, she would. There would be no turning back now, not when the dawn was clear. 

She nods, bowing lowly, but Edelgard lays a hand on her shoulder. 

She leans in close. “You are not swearing your life to protect me alone, Ingrid.” Edelgard stipulates firmly. “You are my equal. Should the opportunity present itself, my life is no more important than yours. ” 

With a nudge, she makes Ingrid stand straight. 

Edelgard is considerably smaller than she, but her towering personality in even her modest imperial regalia, Ingrid feels small in her measuring gaze. She had a stoic yet kind face that Ingrid’s gaze fell on, but averted. 

Ingrid wouldn’t put it below her to not know anything about Ingrid’s background. Edelgard was the leader of the new world, one that tore down its borders, one where the crests have been done away with. There were no longer servants and no one to be served. 

Knights served a master, and Edelgard had pulled that belief and destroyed it, so effortlessly.

So much of all that Ingrid knew had been shattered, yet she allows it to be. 

Now she is dealing with the consequences. Oddly enough, she would rather not have it any other way. 

-

Ingrid stays by Edelgard’s side, in the figurative sense, believing in what she did and what she had to do. 

She realizes that she repeats this, quite often, as if unbeknownst to her greater understanding lies a small part of doubt for herself, for everything as a result of all that she knew being destroyed by herself. 

And yet. 

Ingrid stays by Edelgard’s side, in the literal sense, standing tall beside her, with Hubert on her other flank, and Ferdinand and Byleth across them, placing pins and figurines on the wide map before them. 

She stays, fights with them, and every time she watches Edelgard fight, it makes her want to keep doing so, as well. 

There is something about Edelgard that makes her want to keep going - makes them want to keep going. It is the way she speaks, the way she assures, the way she steers all of them towards victory, and the way she recognizes that none of this would have happened if it weren’t for every single person in her ranks. 

She watches, listens, averts her eyes from the heart-shaped crevice of Edelgard’s dress. The blush that creeps to her neck goes unnoticed by everyone, occupied with the strategy meeting.

 _No,_ Ingrid chastises herself, _you have no time for this._

She maintains a safe distance, for now. 

-

Books, from her youth - what felt like the distant past - sang songs of love, and love that was never returned to knights. It remained with the queens they served, remained with them until their deaths. Chivalry, as Ingrid understood, encouraged it, considered it as something that forms a knight. 

This love, never returned, was crucial to the knight’s holistic being. 

Sometimes that’s what she felt, with Glenn - he was not of kingly blood, but in the past, Ingrid clung to that notion of love even years after he passed. It was never returned, as it could never be, and in her youth - untouched by war and pain and the discomfort with the previous order of things - Ingrid found a strange comfort in fulfilling even one more requirement on the code of chivalry that repeated itself in the books that lined her shelf. 

She clings to it, even now, after everything. Ingrid was no knight. Edelgard was not a queen, was not her liege. She was a leader, a forger of the new world, yet she owned no land, was not the lord that ruled over people who relied on that land. 

But Ingrid protects her, with her life. Loves her fiercely and finds that she is fine if Edelgard never returned the tightly wound emotions bound inside Ingrid’s chest. 

Ingrid was no longer a knight, and Edelgard was not a queen. She still doesn’t know where her place is, in this new world, but Ingrid clings to this familiarity.

She clings, but her grip is not as tight as it was, before. 

-

It becomes more noticeable, Ingrid finds, the more time she spends with Edelgard. It is bearable, at first, and Ingrid tapers it off by looking away when Edelgard catches her watching or moving away when Edelgard is near her. 

Ingrid rules it out as a fierce feeling of protection, despite the near-nothing necessity as Edelgard can protect herself more than anyone else. 

When it crosses a threshold, Ingrid knows because her heart thumps madly against her ribcage when she walks in on Edelgard mid-training, wiping her face with a loose shirt. Ingrid catches the barest of the hard stomach she knows Edelgard hides under the material.

So it shocks her that the sight that makes her heart stop beating in her chest is seeing Edelgard tuck a stray strand behind her ear, noticing that Ingrid had been standing in the doorway, to call her attention. 

“Ingrid?” She says, her voice laced with concern and Ingrid regrets to admit she has to modulate her breathing. “Is something the matter?” 

“I am fine,” Ingrid lies through her teeth, clearing her throat. “Ferdinand requests your presence at the dining hall.” 

Edelgard nods, walking towards the exit and Ingrid barely has any time to breathe when Edelgard stops in front of her, concern in her voice. 

She moves closer, but the distance between them feels like a grassy plain and Ingrid thanks any listening deities for the space that separates their bodies. “Are you certain you are fine? You look like a ghost just moved past you.” 

Ingrid chuckles with abysmally-masked nonchalance. Edelgard has mercy on her and moves away. 

“Come join us,” she says, before turning on her heel towards the door. She offers a hand to Ingrid. 

_This only means something to you,_ Ingrid tells herself. Yet, similar to all the previous times Edelgard had extended her hand to her, Ingrid takes it. 

-

The screams from Edelgard’s chambers make Ingrid clamber to her feet to push through the heavy doors. She had taken the night watch tonight, having trouble sleeping recently. 

“Ingrid,” she calls out, her voice small, incomparable to the deep and mighty tone she uses to command armies and win battles. 

She doesn’t turn to look at Edelgard, but her hand pauses at the handles of the door to Edelgard’s quarters. 

_This only means something to you_ , Ingrid tells herself, like a litany. _This only means something to you._

Edelgard, however, destroys that in the same way she did with a rigid and unjust order of things. “Stay,” the bringer of dawn asks. 

Ingrid almost breaks, almost slips out of her armor and everything she knows about chivalry and love. Almost moves closer to slip under the duvets of Edelgard’s bed, a lonely space - just as lonely as hers, she presumes, or perhaps much more.

Ingrid almosts breaks, so she says that she will, and she does, seated on a chair even if Edelgard insists on sharing the bed that will fit the two of them comfortably.

When Ingrid says no, there is a flash of disappointment that Ingrid almost regrets denying Edelgard this, but it’s overtaken by relief at the thought of Ingrid staying, of another body in the room. 

Edelgard falls asleep, and Ingrid follows shortly. 

At dawn, Ingrid wakes with a blanket covering her body. Edelgard is still fast asleep, but in a few more minutes she must wake to attend to her duties. 

Ingrid slips away, and in the morning they don’t talk about it, save for a quiet but appreciative ‘thank you’, muttered by Edelgard as she passes by her at the mess hall. 

-

“Are you happy here?” Asks Edelgard, suddenly, as Ingrid helps her unlace the ties of her gauntlet. She doesn’t pull it off, as per Edelgard’s request. 

Somehow, Ingrid found herself as the last person Edelgard sees before she sleeps, and that had done nothing to quell the pressure between her ribs at the sight of Edelgard’s hair down.

“Of course,” Ingrid says, as if she hadn’t been wondering about her place in this new world is every night, as if she wasn’t still coming to terms with so many new things she had discovered about herself.

Edelgard doesn’t seem convinced, but she does not prod any further. Instead, she looks at Ingrid in the mirror. “You may leave, if that pleases you.” 

_Where would I go?_ She asks herself. _What would I do?_ She had lived her life with a singular purpose, and even when the world she knew had been destroyed, Ingrid clung to a semblance of it despite its frailty. 

“If it would help you, and if it would make you happy,” Edelgard says, intimately but not softly, a tone Ingrid realizes she uses when it’s only the two of them. “Rebuilding this and the one you knew before is uncomfortable but it must be done.” 

Ingrid nods, but says nothing, unsure of what she wants to say in the first place. 

-

It hurts, the then acute pain spreading to different parts of her body. 

“Ingrid, keep your eyes open,” a distant voice speaks, and Ingrid feels like her ears are cupped by glass jars. “Help is coming.” 

She feels herself slipping, like her soul was covered in oil and sliding away from her body, the pain already fading. 

Edelgard’s face is stricken, looking down at her, blood staining her cheeks, and her bleary eyesight can’t tell where the blood ends and where the imperial regalia begins. 

_Protect Edelgard,_ her mind echoed. _Not ‘my majesty’, not ‘my liege’._

 _Protect my friend, my love._

Then, Ingrid dies. 

-

Then, Ingrid wakes. 

Her body is sore and she can’t move from her waist down. She lets out a breath that hurts, actually, when she focuses on moving her toes. It hurts, but it moves, and Ingrid clears her throat, painfully dry. 

“Ingrid?” A voice says, at her side. She knows it’s Edelgard, doesn’t need to turn her head to know she’s beside her at once. There is a gloved hand on hers as she regains back more of herself, despite nausea sitting dangerously inside her stomach. 

She turns her head to see the last thing she saw before she slipped away, Edelgard’s face, stricken but now mixed with terrible relief that she hasn’t seen from Edelgard.

“Why did you do that?” She begins, frustrated but laughing, shaking her head. All those months ago, Ingrid didn’t promise anything about giving her life to Edelgard despite her insistence. 

Ingrid, from years ago, would have replied: _you are my liege._

 _You are my love,_ Ingrid replies, in her head. 

-

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Ingrid was beyond prepared for Edelgard to not love her back. 

She was, however, completely mistaken, in the same way that Edelgard throws her off, destroying her expectations for herself and other people. 

Ingrid finds that she was barely prepared, abysmally so, for the way Edelgard’s gaze lingers just a little bit too long, the way she sees Edelgard turning away when Ingrid meets her eyes, the subtle brushing of their hands during strategy meetings.

And yet even as she finds this, finds that she loves Edelgard, it strengthens her need to find herself, find her place. 

It is not here, not yet anyway. 

She needs time. 

Ingrid recovers, Ingrid loves, Ingrid decides. 

-

“You’re sure?” Sylvain asks, leaning on the doorframe. “It can be good for you.” 

“I think so,” she replies. “But Edelgard…” 

Sylvain laughs, but doesn’t acknowledge the way a blush crawls up her cheek. “She’ll be fine.” 

Ingrid nods, doesn’t doubt it one bit.

-

Ingrid pulls off Edelgard’s red bodice to set it aside neatly. The fireplace crackles in front of them, and it fits into their easy silence perfectly. 

“Edelgard, may I speak to you about something?” she says, softly, unwilling to break the silence. Edelgard hums, and her heart thunders in her chest, a stark contrast to the quiet that surrounds them. “I am leaving.” 

“Where to?”

She looks away, folding her cape. “I'm not sure.” 

Edelgard nods, chuckling. “That is unlike you, but I understand. Do what you must.” 

She lets out a sigh she doesn’t know she’s holding. “Thank you.” 

A beat of silence. “Is it me?” 

“No,” she replies, simply. “It’s me. I have much to figure out.” 

A hand touches hers, from its position on Edelgard’s shoulder. “I understand,” she repeats, then silence falls over them. 

She remembers how so many people feared and loathed Edelgard, called her a cruel and vile creature. 

The woman in front of her is far from it, small, vulnerable, with her armor stripped off and Ingrid loves her, would follow her, not as knight but as her lover. 

There is a lull, which Edelgard fills, seemingly in a good mood. “Tell me about your favorite songs from Loog.” 

She chuckles, fond of the way Edelgard remembers all these small things about her. “There was one about a knight that fell in love with his liege’s wife. She returned his love, and it crossed lines that should not have been crossed.” Ser Bram was one of Ingrid’s favorite songs, and Sylvain only ever knew so. Now, Edelgard knows, as well. 

Another silence. “Have you been in love with a married person?” 

Ingrid’s breath catches in her throat. “Not quite,” she admits, pathetically. She loosens her grip on the ledge, feels her feet hanging from beneath her. “But sometimes, it feels like she is.”

Ingrid doesn’t have to look at her to hear the disappointment in her voice and the way her shoulders that hold the weight of the world droops slightly. “Who is she married to?”

She inhales sharply, then exhales. “Her duty,” Ingrid replies, honestly, softly. 

The fireplace continues to crackle, filling the silence, and Edelgard turns, the remainder of her regalia moving with her. 

She looks up at Ingrid, a distinct look of hope in her face. Her gloved hand moves up to caress Ingrid’s cheek in foreign affection that Ingrid welcomes. “Will you come back?” asks Edelgard. 

“Yes, of course,” Ingrid replies, truthfully, lovingly. For all the trouble and confusion, she knew that she would come back. 

Edelgard leans close, presses their lips together, and kisses Ingrid sweeter than anything in this world. 

_Something to come back to._ Ingrid kisses her back, and it feels like a knight’s song from a distant past that she no longer believed in. 

Edelgard wraps her arms around her, moves in closer, and Ingrid believes in her instead. 

-

“Don’t forget your good old pal, okay?” Sylvain tells her, and Ingrid drops her bags to embrace him. “Write. Be safe.” 

“Don’t be an idiot while I’m away,” she admonishes, but she hugs him fiercely, anyway. 

Edelgard stands back, allowing them some time, and when she moves closer to Ingrid, offering her favorite cloak, Ingrid exhales. Her breath puffs in the early morning air. To their right, the sun peeks from the mountains to the east of the capital. 

“You have a place to come back to. Always,” is what Edelgard tells her, standing in close. Ingrid wants to kiss her, so she does. 

“I know,” Ingrid replies, and kisses her even more, pressing their lips together in ways that feel far from goodbye. 

Edelgard was not a queen, was not her liege.

Ingrid was no longer a knight. Life was not a song of Loog. 

When Ingrid takes off, she feels the world change around her. She lets it. 

**Author's Note:**

> Finished and posted on company time lmfao 
> 
> Find me on twitter @belivets and sharpshocks on tumblr!


End file.
